It sounds like our good friend Peter Anderson has found some neat fishing that just about qualifies as on his doorstep.
After many years of traipsing a long way to catch trout, my luck changed this season. Living in chalk stream land might be a dream for many, but in reality it usually means paying an arm and a leg to catch fat stockies, rainbows sometimes for God’s sake! So I was in seventh heaven when I was able to join a very small syndicate on the Meon, about 35 miles from home. OK, not on the doorstep but closer than I had been accustomed to travelling. Then, bingo, ad in Trout & Salmon announced that a club had limited vacancies (in fact, two vacancies!) for a mile or so of the Lambourn only 10 miles from home. An email, a phone call, a meeting with me on best behaviour, and hallelujah I was in! Now these are both chalk streams and they are both quite short, the Meon is 21 miles from source to mouth, the Lambourn perhaps 15 miles. There the similarity ends.
In its upper reaches, the Meon is a typical chalk stream. Crystal clear, waving beds of ranunculus. Gravel bottomed. No grayling. Our water is close to the mouth of the river and is deliberately not maintained. It is narrow, 10-15 feet or so and very heavily treed and these are not trimmed back, you lose a lot of flies! There isn’t a lot of weed and it twists and turns with deep undercut banks. The bottom is generally gravel, but there are patches of mud and there are deep holes. This is not a river to enter at the bottom end and wade up to the top, it may be only 10 feet wide but some of the pools could well be 10 feet deep. There are also lots of obstacles in the river, fallen trees which are left in place to provide cover for the fish. Oh yes, the chap who told me that there are no grayling on the Meon was mistaken, there are grayling in or water, some decent sized fish too.
So how do you fish this chalk stream that is nothing like a chalk stream? t just isn’t good dry fly water. We have a good mayfly hatch but the fish don’t seem to switch onto them with any great enthusiasm….at least they haven’t for me. It is nymph water. When I first was introduced to the water, the duo was recommended as the best approach. It is a method I am comfortable with and it produced some good results. I now tend to just use a nymph though. There are a couple of reasons: firstly, there are big variations in depth over quite a short length of river which leads to a lot of fiddling about adjusting the depth the nymph is fishing at; secondly, the tree and vegetation density is such that every cast invites snagging on something, a risk doubled with two flies. The further up the beat one goes, though, the narrower, snaggier and… er, bendier it becomes.The best method here is short nymphing with a fairly heavy nymph, say a size 12 hook and a 2.5mm tungsten bead with all of the fly line off the water with the rod leading the nymph through the pools. It produces some lovely fish and it is absorbing sport…..but not traditional chalk stream fishing!
The Lambourn, on the other hand, is as classic a chalk stream as it is possible to get. Our bottom beat is deliberately unmaintained and not stocked, although stockies do find their way here. Frankly, it fishes best in April and early May, by the end of May the weed and bankside vegetation make it pretty well unfishable. The rest of the water is “managed”. We have working parties and the bankside vegetation is trimmed a couple of times a season. We only fish one bank and the other is left wild to provide cover for the fish. We have luxuriant weed growth and crystal clear water. We stock, but only browns and of a sensible size and we limit fishing to two rods per day. As a “classic” chalk stream it falls down in that the fish are perhaps not quite as free rising as on some other rivers but any disappointment at that can be quickly assuaged by the fact that it is perfect water for sight nymphing. There remains a certain snobbery on the chalk streams where many will only fish the dry fly. Fair enough, it’s up to them, but anybody who has not experienced the thrill of spotting a fish, deliberately targeting it and seeing it move to and take the nymph has missed one of the joys of fishing!
So there we are. After trying for 10 years I finally have membership of a couple of reasonably priced syndicates on interesting rivers not too far from home. Well worth the wait!
Keep up with Peter's fly fishing adventures via his excellent blog Walks and Fishes